About

Viable Energy is a blog about green, renewable, sustainable energy. Using green and viable energy can help reduce humanities carbon footprint.

I am the owner and author of all current articles, and am actively looking for co-authors and editors.

Originally I am from Austria and my first language is German – hence I look a lot to Germany’s Energiewende, and a few outstanding German utilities for ideas. As an engineer I worked for Silicon Valley for 10 years and got my green card there and have been on Kauai since 2003. Since my teens I have been trying to live as sustainable as possible. During some years this meant choosing locally grown over organic, avoiding beef and other meat, line drying my clothes and shopping at thrift stores. I kept these habits during more prosperous times, and kept finding new and better ways to conserve materials and energy, reuse and recycle and grow food. eventually installed solar hot water and started experimenting with and reading about other forms of solar energy.

Last year we, as a household and family worked on reducing our carbon footprint, actually trying to go carbon-neutral. The main sources of CO2 we produced were household electricity, burning propane for range and dryer and our gas-powered vehicles. We got a large PV array, and traded 2 cars for an elctrical vehicle. Our PV system was oversized to produce twice what our household needed, for one to be able to charge the car purely on solar energy, and the other reason was the electricity wholesale to retail 2:1 ratio (For every kWh consumed from the grid we had to feed 2 kWhs into the grid, independent from the time of the day). I assumed that the electricity our PV array sent back to the grid would make up for additional CO2 released on our behalf (while transporting our goods, or pumping our water…) and it made more ecological and economical sense than to size the system smaller and store our energy in batteries.

if we continue to network and create alliances across cultures and across the island, we will eventually be successful in compelling kiuc to adopt policies that better serve our island and our communities that depend upon it. “imua” toward a ‘grounded’ approach! jonathan